was a truly amazing man
he pretended to be
rich
even though we lived on beans and mush and weenies
when we sat down to eat, he said,
“not everybody can eat like this”

and because he wanted to be rich or because he actually
thought he was rich
he always voted Republican
and he voted for Hoover against Roosevelt
and he lost
and then he voted for Alf Landon against Roosevelt
and he lost again
saying, “I don’t know what this world is coming to,
now we’ve got that god damned Red in there again
and the Russians will be in our backyard next!”

I think it was my father who made me decide to
become a bum.
I decided that if a man like that wants to be rich
then I want to be poor.

and I became a bum.
I lived on nickles and dimes and
in cheap rooms and
on park benches.
I thought maybe the bums knew something.

but I found out that most of the bums wanted to be
rich too.
they had just failed at that.

so caught between my father and the bums
I had no place to go
and I went there fast and slow.
never voted Republican
never voted.

buried him
like an oddity of the earth
like a hundred thousand oddities
like millions of other oddities,
wasted.

E, porque vem sempre a propósito, a história do bico divino de Agnes Blannbekin: "The Austrian nun Agnes Blannbekin joined the Third Order of Saint Francis in Vienna in 1260 and for the rest of her life refused to eat meat, claiming the body of Christ was enough meat for her. She wasn’t joking!
She claimed to taste Christ while eating the Eucharist and described drinking a 'refreshing spiritual drink' from the spear wound of Jesus. She would have orgasms whenever Jesus appeared to her.
She was obsessed with the Holy Prepuce and claimed to have felt the foreskin of Jesus in her mouth.
Her visions were transcribed by a Franciscan monk and he records: “Crying and with compassion, she began to think about the foreskin of Christ, where it may be located [after the Resurrection].
And behold, soon she felt with the greatest sweetness on her tongue a little piece of skin alike the skin in an egg, which she swallowed.
After she had swallowed it, she again felt the little skin on her tongue with sweetness as before, and again she swallowed it.
And this happened to her about a hundred times. And when she felt it so frequently, she was tempted to touch it with her finger.
And when she wanted to do so, that little skin went down her throat on its own. And it was told to her that the foreskin was resurrected with the Lord on the day of resurrection.
And so great was the sweetness of tasting that little skin that she felt in all [her] limbs and parts of the limbs a sweet transformation”.